Antigone Physical Theatre - 16/11/16

As a warm up for the lesson we did some exercises around Greek theatre and the way the chorus told stories which didn't happen on the stage. Using the example of a story where a king cut out his son's tongue and ate it, we came up with a mime to portray this and did it in synchronisation. Then following this we came up with some sentences which the chorus say in synchronisation, I was pretty proud of what we came up with considering how long we had:

The son disobeyed the father,

The father cut out the tongue,

He took the tongue and ate it,

And then the son was gone.

The main task for the lesson was to take 50 minutes to come up with a series of physical theatre-like movements to portray the story of Antigone in around 5 minutes. Split into groups, we began to tell the story firstly with the scene where the 'actors' come in then turn into the characters, followed by the scenes with the Nurse, Ismene, Haemon, Guard and Creon. I really loved creating this sequence as it gave us leeway to have a creative portrayal with abstract movement to show the connections and stories between the characters. I don't think we had enough experience of movements like this to create something really eye catching or fluid, but with what we had I think what we came up with had a lot of really nice images and clearly managed to tell the story. However, there were a couple of points which could have been polished to make the transitions smoother and a couple of moments could have been more intense especially the end of Creon's confrontation with Antigone. We also forgot to include Haemon's scene with Creon which could have had a really heartbreaking moment, as well as forgetting to create the connection between Creon and his wife to make the suicides at the end more effective. All in all, I was pretty pleased with our performance as it was smoothly performed, with nice transitions and images.

The video had to be uploaded in two parts because blogger couldn't take higher than 100 MB.